Up to 80 percent of crime in the UK is committed by people who had behavioral problems as children and teenagers, a report published yesterday said.
Early-intervention programs for young children could significantly lower crime levels, a study by the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health said.
The cost of crime related to “conduct problems” — defined by the report as problems such as disobedience, lying, fighting and stealing — is £60 billion (US$99.2 billion) a year, said Sean Duggan, joint executive of the center.
“Pre-school parenting support for families at risk is especially good value for money. One US scheme has been shown to reduce the costs of crime by US$11 for every US$1 invested in it,” he said.
The most effective prevention schemes — including those aimed at pre-school children — can reduce future offending by more than 50 percent, the study said.
“Over time, nothing would have a bigger impact than making these programs much more widely available than is presently the case,” it states.
Childhood mental health problems can result in poor educational achievement, unemployment, low earnings, teenage pregnancies and marital problems as well as criminality, said the report, which assessed data from every child born in one week in 1970, as well as comparing other studies from around the world.
Andy Bell, deputy chief executive at the center, said pre-school group parenting programs should be widely available, and voluntary.
“It makes sense to put funds into helping children at an early age, because it pays back handsomely and it is very good value for money,” he said.
Group-based parenting programs cost less than £900 a child while home-based support for the parents of children with conduct disorder — the most serious form of behavioral problems — costs £4,000. A lifetime of crime committed by a single prolific offender can cost up to £1.5 million, the study found. It estimates that the lifetime costs of crime are an average of £160,000 for each child with conduct disorder and £45,000 for those with mild or moderate conduct problems.
It would only require one in 25 children with conduct problems to not enter a life of crime for prevention schemes to be cost-effective, Andy Bell, deputy chief executive at the center, said. Only one child in 20 has a conduct disorder, but they go on to commit 30 percent of crime at a cost to society of more than £22 billion a year. Another 45 percent of children have mild or moderate behavior problems, and go on to commit half of all crime at a cost of £37 billion a year.
The study says that 1 percent of the annual law and order budget could fund a comprehensive program of pre-school support for up to one-third of all children born each year.
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